I spent much of the film thinking about Docklands. What it was and what it became. How does the barely-remembered Vietnam war map onto the barely remembered Docklands (before it became the current megalopolis Docklands). For those who don’t know: Kubrick, who didn’t like leaving Britain, reconstructed Vietnam in the ruins of the part of London known as Docklands, once the maritime hub of the capital, which as Britain declined as a trading nation, was an area that had fallen into disuse. The same Docklands would soon become the site for the development of a new financial and commercial zone, Canary Wharf.
Is there a link between Kubrick’s retrospective vision and the neo-liberal explosion that was constructed on the charred relics of his fictional Vietnam? Does the defeat of the USA reverberate with the unleashing of capital that was to follow, an unleashing that has transformed the landscape on the other side of the Thames? I remember, living in Blackheath, watching from the window of the bedsit I was living in at the time, as Canary Wharf tower was being built, going up floor by floor, like some unlikely and unwanted donation from a New York billionaire. I can date that to 1990, because I watched Mandela being released from prison on a TV in that same bedsit. 32 years ago now. Kubrick’s film is set around the Tet Offensive, in 1968, only 22 years earlier. He filmed in 1985-86, only a few years before the area’s transformation. He was closer to the Vietnam war then than we are now to the birth of turbo-capitalism, which rose from the ashes of the USA’s defeat, rising on the land where he realised his fictional recreation of that defeat.
Weirdly, it’s hard not to mourn for that cinematic vision of the Vietnam war, a cinematic vision which produced material as rich as anything US cinema has produced since. Watching the likes of Barbie and Oppenheimer, popcorn movies, one step removed from the Marvel franchise, it’s hard not to yearn for the generation whose horizons were broadened by defeat, by the tarnishing of the dream. Full Metal Jacket feels more schematic than Apocalypse or Deer Hunter, but it is still a rigid, sceptical examination of history, one which permits the construction of anti-heroes, rather than heroes, of doubt rather than affirmation. What came in the wake of this doubt was the bombast of Dockands, a requirement to shroud weakness in steel, to obliviate it from our narratives. The only time that narrative was punctured, in 2001, it was met with the force of a militarised blowback which, in theory, would insure against another Vietnam, although in practice, the empire was still just as wobbly. only this time, no-one got to make films about it. There are no wastelands in our modern techno-cities to re-enact the catastrophes of Fallujah, or Kandahar. And where the will might exist, the interest has waned. What turbo-capitalism has done so effectively is to out-source trauma, even failure. It happens in another dimension, not ours. And should anyone start to question that narrative, the counter-narratives of Trump or Brexit or Milei or Bolsonaro are wheeled out, to say: you too could live in that shiny steel tower. You may live in the ashes and debris of a bombed-out society, which was once harmonious, but don’t despair. If you kill your inner gook, you too can construct a temple in the sky, draw the blinds, press play, and lose yourself in the virtual reality of other people’s wars.
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